Rochona Majumdar to Speak about Radical Cinema and the Film Society Movement in India

The South Asian Studies Council at Yale is pleased to welcome Rochona Majumdar for a talk titled “Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India’.

November 16, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

Rochona Majumdar is Assistant Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.  She is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century India, with research specialties in the history of gender, marriage and family in India; cultural and political history in modern India; modern Bengal, Indian cinema, as well as postcolonial history and theory.  Her Book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1956 (Duke University Press, 2009) analyzes the changing configuration of the “joint family” in the context of shifts in the institution of arranged marriage and the marriage market in Bengal. She is a co-editor with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).  Professor Majumdar’s latest book, Writing Postcolonial History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), analyzes the ways in which postcolonial theory has influenced the historian’s craft. She is also engaged in a longer-term research project on the history of Indian cinema, an aspect of which she will speak about in her presentation to the South Asian Studies Council Colloquium.

Abstract for “Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement in India.”
This talk examines the history of the creation and development of the film society movement in India from 1947-1980.  The movement consisted of important Indian film directors like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterji, Mani Kaul, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen as well as film enthusiasts, numbering altogether about a hundred thousand by the end of the period under review.  The film society movement, confined though it was to those who considered themselves film aficionados, remains a significant but neglected aspect of the history of Indian cinema.  Film societies are the lens through which I study the relationship between cinema and a fledgling civil society in India during the first three decades after independence.  In so doing, I also map the two distinct definitions of “good cinema”–from an aesthetically sophisticated product to a radical political text—that were debated over the course of the movement.